I7 does not like my floating spirit.

I have a new one for you’all:

The bold line is flaged by I7 as an error.

I’m not quite sure how to fix this one. I7 won’t accept GPS coordinates and I don’t know how to be more specific. :frowning:

You didn’t put quotes around the description (the second sentence) above. Do that and it compiles fine. Inform has no built-in notion of floating, so it guessed you were trying to declare a relationship that it didn’t understand. If this wasn’t meant as a description, but rather some sort of specially coded “floating” action or activity, then you’ll need to let us know what specific behavior you’re looking for. (Note that this thread might get moved to the Inform sub-forum.)

HTH,

I just noticed something else with your code:

There is an Air Compressor here."The Air Compressor is old and rusty. The fly wheel which was used to drive it is broken and several of the spokes are missing.". It is fixed in place. The Air Compressor is here.
You’ve mixed up the syntax; you can say:

There is an Air Compressor.

… which creates an offstage object called “an air compressor”, or

An Air Compressor is here.

… which creates an object called “an air compressor” in the most recently referenced room. You can combine the two this way:

There is an Air Compressor. The Air Compressor is here.

… which creates the object and then declares it to be in that location, but don’t do this:

There is an Air Compressor here.

This creates an object called “an Air Compressor here” (the word “here” is part of the name). See the output:

I usually just say, “An Air Compressor is in DR7536.” Some people like using “here” and it’s a matter of style / preference. But if you think you’ve created an object in a location and it doesn’t show up, check the world index to make sure you haven’t accidentally created an offstage object with an unintended name. (Hope that makes sense.)

Edited to add: you did the same thing with “the Hole Drilling Machine.”
Edited again to add: Jim Aikin is going to love this post. :wink:

This is actually the initial appearance and not the description, isn’t it? See 3.11 (for wgm) – the initial appearance is the paragraph that prints in the room description until you pick the object up, the description is what you get when you examine it.

Oh, and wgm: I think reason you got that particular error message is because “can see” is a relation that’s understood by Inform, so when you say “You can see the salt miner floating up above the air compressor” without quotes, Inform thinks you’re trying to declare a relationship between you and an object called “the salt miner floating up above the air compressor.” (And you can’t declare that relationship that way, since you can see an object if e.g. it’s in a lit room with you and nothing else is interfering.) If you removed quotes from one of the other initial appearances, I bet you’d get a different error message. You walked into something where your prose was partially understood as code in an unexpected way.

Sorry about the delay in answering your last hints, but I have been digging into my code and finding several “stupidities”. The hint about how to declare names has help tremendously. :mrgreen:

Now if I can fix the rest of the program I’ll be on my way - Actually, a lot of my problems have been in learning the syntax and once I do that I suspect my writing will go faster and a bit smoother.